The Dead Scout's Handbook of Afterlife Survival

Chapter 0: The End of an Afterlife

Thomas Caldwell released the trigger on the lighter; the flame vanished.  He stared at the trembling metal portal before him, smoke trailing in a thin stream from its lips to join the steam of his own breath.  With another spin of the wheel, a new fire rose from the lighter and died again.  Since quitting smoking, this became a habit.  Repetitive fire from the lighter carried hope that he might find a more compelling addiction than those cancer sticks.  But Thomas wasn't sure why he worried about cancer--he died years ago.

Thomas also found comfort in fidgeting.  A flick of his fingers and the lighter spun.  A twist of the wrist and the lighter twirled.  A sudden absence of motion and the lighter stopped, hovering in midair.  Snowflakes flurried about it, the wheel still spinning without his touch.

Ahead of him, a shrieking chorus wailed from the Jackson Hole Airport.  Thomas' focus remained on the flickers spitting from his lighter.  The screams and chaos didn't matter.  He got to see his son again today.  His living son.  Perhaps not living for much longer; today, Thomas constructed a game of dominoes with candles and dynamite.  

His headset crackled. "Thomas?  Thomas, what the hell did you do?"

"Hey, Vin." Thomas replied absentmindedly, pocketing the lighter, bored of telekinesis and fire.

A long exhalation hissed from Vincent's end of the communication line.  "Tom, where is the Sigil, where is the transportation suit, and where in God's name are you?"

"I took the transportation suit to visit my son in the world of the living and gave the sigil to him." Thomas settled to his popping knees, then slouched back on the snow covered earth. "And don't bother asking where I am because it already knows."

"I know.  It's furious.  I...I think it's going to kill you, Thomas." Vincent's voice lowered to a whisper.  "Can you see it?  Can it see you?"

"Not really and I dunno.  That is the point of active camouflage though, isn't it?" Tom glanced to his side, then shook his head, remembering that Vincent's voice came from his headset.

"Well, it's coming for you--and your kid if it hasn't killed him already."

"Naturally."  The word elongated as Thomas stretched himself out along the hilltop.  He readied himself for a reply but was drowned out by a thunderous crash from above; two orange flashes burnt through the snowfall.  A brief hiss of interference brought Thomas back to the conversation.  "You would've done the same."

Vincent's voice evened, revealing the steady lecturer's voice that Thomas had known for years. "I don't deny that, Thomas.  However, your family is in the before-afterlife while mine is in the after-afterlife." 

"There isn't an after-afterlife."

"Exactly.  Which is why you need to avoid going there.  Now Thomas, perhaps you may placate the thing." Vincent pled.

"I won't.  I'm sorry, Vin.  I knew the consequences of my actions.  I'm going to face those consequences here, and hopefully, I wasn't wrong to trust this power in my son's hands."

"It won't matter.  That thing--that monster--it's as smart as its maker.  It'll just get your kid to do what it wanted anyway.  The slow ones like your boy, they just follow; all you did today was for nothing.  Please find forgiveness.  We can take the Sigil back from your son somehow.  We can figure out a way..."

Vincent's feed cut out as a shockwave rushed back, carrying snow like a tidal wave over Thomas.  A few hundred yards away, smoke billowed from below to join the clouds.  The screams ceased and the mass of steel and wood caved in on itself.  After ten seconds of deafening roars, wailing steel, snapping wood, everything silenced again as the wind carried any rumblings to the mountaintops.  Averting his eyes, Thomas flung himself back against the snowbank.  

He held his lighter aloft, rolling the metal wheel once more.  The flame danced at the tip of his thumb, waving in the wind, surviving the snowfall.  It flickered for fifteen seconds before his thumb burned, and still he held it until a gust mercifully squelched it.

Thomas craned his neck to examine the source of the disturbance.  The thing had arrived.  

Rising forty feet skyward, a shimmering distortion of light rocked back and forth.  It lumbered toward him and crouched downward, bringing two burning eyes--the only breaks in its camouflage--within a dozen feet of Thomas' face.

Hopping to his feet, Thomas pinged the lighter off the space between the two glowing spheres.  

"It's done!"   He threw both arms upward. "You know who has the Sigil, and if you had a half decent creator, you know you can't take it back."

The two red eyes tilted, peering at Thomas.  For a split second, within each red sphere, sideways eights glowed.  With the groan of rending steel, the two lights rose upward and the transparent machinery expanded, towering above him.

In the final seconds of Thomas Caldwell's afterlife, thoughts raced by and memories he long considered dead rose. All things science, fiction, and science fiction fell into perception like the snowflakes falling around him.  He considered life, death, and afterdeath; he pondered the meaning of right and wrong, of good and evil.  But most importantly, Thomas wondered if his child, the man he chose for this job, the man he just pushed down a path far more difficult than Thomas himself could have survived, had ever considered any of that.